I spent a lot of time yesterday and today upgrading the look of the print order forms and shopping carts on Vintagraph and Shorpy. The old design looked clunky and had a very 1999 feel to it. It was basic html and lacked the appeal of most modern web stores.
With the new design I wanted to present a more sophisticated look and, on Vintagraph, help people make a purchase choice based on our most popular print size. That’s a tip I picked up from The Smashing Book (highly recommended). So I layered on some CSS, settled on a color scheme I liked and put together something that looks significantly better and more professional.
I also moved Shorpy over to the same shopping cart system we’ve been using on Vintagraph. Previously all orders on Shorpy went directly to PayPal, which was a turnoff for some people. And although it was possible for people to pay with a credit card without creating a PayPal account, it was not at all clear how to do so. We surely lost some sales from people who didn’t want to create a PayPal account.
Our new cart lets people pay directly with a credit card or choose PayPal or Google checkout. It also looks and behaves like a familiar shopping cart and makes it easier for us to manage shipping rates and discounts.
What started out as a novelty from a couple of visitors to Shorpy has grown into a rather large collection of colorized photos. We now have 96 photos in the gallery and a few more in the wings waiting to be posted. It’s interesting that the first few colorized photos that were shared on the site inspired a number of other people to start taking a crack at it. The quality varies, but a number are quite well done. The comments on a few of the photos have also become heated as people attack or defend the practice of altering historic images. The consensus seems to be, “let people have some fun.”
Today I spent some time working on the About page of Historic Stock. I hopefully gave potential clients some good reasons for purchasing their stock images from our site and not somewhere else.
On all of my business sites I’m concerned with answering the customer question: “Why should I buy from here?” Sometimes that’s a value proposition and I have to convince the customer their money is being well spent and they’re getting a good value. Other times it’s a question of trust and we have to convince buyers we will actually fulfill our promise to deliver the product at the quality they expect.
On Historic Stock it’s a little of both. I answered the quality and value issue by showing some before and after samples of the images we offer and explaining more about the amount of work that goes into preparing the images. As for delivering on our promise, we try to be transparent about the types and sizes of images we upload and also pointing to our reputation of running the popular, community-oriented site at Shorpy.
I was able to painlessly migrate my Tumblr blog to Wordpress using the handy Tumblr2WordPress script. The script timed out the first few times I ran it, but eventually it exported all of my Tumblr posts (900+) as an XML file that I imported directly into WordPress. It did not preserve the “friendly URLs” I had in Tumblr, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem since I’m not getting a lot of search engine traffic to the site.
I was concerned about whether my photos would make the transition over. In a way, they did. The export preserved the links to the original files on Tumblr. I would have preferred that the photos be pulled over and hosted with this WordPress install. That is a project I have to pursue later by manually moving each image.
The site still needs a few design tweaks, but it’s all gone pretty well. Before on Tumblr and after on WordPress.
Madison school board meeting for tonight has been canceled. The administrative office tells me the meeting has not yet been rescheduled.about 15 hours agofrom Brizzly
I spent a lot of time yesterday and today upgrading the look of the print order forms and shopping carts on Vintagraph and Shorpy. The old design looked clunky and had a very 1999 feel to it. It was basic html and lacked the appeal of most modern web stores.
I also moved Shorpy over to the same shopping cart system we’ve been using on Vintagraph. Previously all orders on Shorpy went directly to PayPal, which was a turnoff for some people. And although it was possible for people to pay with a credit card without creating a PayPal account, it was not at all clear how to do so. We surely lost some sales from people who didn’t want to create a PayPal account.
